The 11th annual China Goes Global conference (CGG 2017) took place between 15-17 June at the University of Agder, in Kristiansand, Norway. I was last at this conference in 2014 [1, 2] in Shanghai, where this year’s gathering in Kristiansand, Norway, provides yet another splendid opportunity and platform for networking and the exchange of ideas on internationalisation processes related to China and the Chinese context.

The opening ceremony of the Collaborative Robot Test Center (CRTC) at Robotdalen, Expectrum, in Västerås, Sweden, took place on 4 May 2017. CRTC is located within the creative learning hub of Expectrum, Västerås city’s meeting place for technology entrepreneurs, thought leaders and innovators. In terms of providing pioneering robotics solutions, CRTC, a joint project between ABB, Robotdalen and Mälardalen högskolan, will offer pre-studies to SME automation processes in use of collaborative robot, YuMi (Bergman, 2017; Löfvenberg, 2017).

Urban landscapes increasingly leverage advancing technologies to co-create socio-economic infrastructures and processes (Wakeford, 2004). In that aspect, CRTC’s lab location and its evolution as a robotics solution unit now officially open, could be seen as marking in contribution towards a larger global movement in the democratising of technology.

One my own personal highlights of spring is to meet with students of the Singapore Management University (SMU) Business Study Mission (BSM) Scandinavia. Led by Tom Estad, Associate Dean for Student Matters and Academic Director at SMU, the programme is dynamic in its approach towards teaching and student learning. A core philosophy of SMU is to increase efforts towards interdisciplinary programmes, outside of classroom experiences for students and helping individuals cultivate lifelong learning skills. In hosting the Straits Times (ST) Education Forum 2017 and discussing the future scenario of work, SMU, as an institution of higher education, is explicit in its efforts of striving to be an ecosphere where individuals can “learn how to learn” [1]. Continue reading “Singapore Management University BSM Scandinavia 2017 visit to the Swedish west coast”→

Title
Using systemic functional linguistic metafunction as a tool in identifying Agency in organizational change in cross-cultural management contexts

Abstract

This contribution addresses the echoing sentiment that the function of language is not enough focused on in management as an academic discipline even as it is acknowledged that language lies at the heart of international business (IB) activities that take place in cross-cultural management (CCM) contexts. Organizations operate in contexts of uncertainty and change, finding themselves increasingly having to navigate in cross-cultural environments in the context of globalization and international management. Yet, few studies outside the field of applied linguistics (especially discourse analysis) have used language as an instrumental tool in uncovering the subtle workings of influence in organizational change. Scholastic literature in CCM suggests that language in IB is generally studied in two broad dimensions of inquiry – language as (i) object/phenomenon (nature of language) and as (ii) process/function (nature of meaning from language). Because organizational change can be difficult to define when looking at it as a broad process over time, this article addresses the latter nature of language in CCM and IB studies in illustrating how language metafunctions can be used as a methodological tool in analysing qualitative data in order to uncover Agency or actors of influence in processes of organization change in a cross-cultural working context.

When studying trends of technological innovation, my thoughts are often drawn towards the evolution of the robotics industry and the impact of systems biology on machine design / function. Developed from the perspective of biological evolution as described in a 2006 study on self-modeling resilient machines, intelligent machines can self-diagnose its context, morph, adapt behaviour and replicate:

For a number of years now, students of the Singapore Management University (SMU) have made it a tradition on their annual Scandinavian Business Study Missions, to visit the actual departure point of the Swedish East India Company (1731-1813) yearly voyages to China. It was in the aftermath of these trips and those of the Portuguese, Dutch and the English companies that the very state of Singapore was founded just a few years thereafter as a British trading post in 1819.

Some years back, I found myself in discussion with a professor of economic geography, of the travels with students on a geography field study trip to an ice cave in Russia where during the time of the late 1900s, travel routes between Sweden and Russia were not as accessible as they are today. Listening to the somewhat humour filled challenges of gathering about sixteen students on the trip with either poor clothing choice or sometimes even lack of proper food during the long outdoor treks, I wondered if I could myself ever pull through such an expedition. I asked the professor what motivated him to arrange this student ice cave travel to Russia? Continue reading “Singapore Management University BSM Scandinavia 2016 visit to the Swedish west coast”→

In 1976, Fritjof Capra, Ph.D, a Vienna-born physicist and systems theorist published The Tao of Physics [1] that explored the way in which modern physics was changing our world perspective from mechanistic to holistic and ecological. It was this underlying influence of systemic thinking and modeling of thought I was interested in when given the opportunity at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, to meet with two distinguished individuals belonging to the realm of systemic thinkers and activists in an evening of lectures – Gunter Pauli, author of The Blue Economy [2] and founder of the Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI), and Göran Carstedt, Assar Gabrielsson Professor Continue reading “Modeling Systems Thinking: knowledge as network”→

Carl Gustav Jung, on reductionism in science, with in my view, implications for the current dominant paradigm of theories of human cognitive development, and culture. Transcript from a 1990 documentary of Jung [1] based on his works [2, 3].

“Mythology is pronouncing of a series of images that formulate the life of archetypes. So the statements of every religion, of many poets and so on, are statements about the inner mythological process, which is a necessity because man is not complete if he is not conscious of that aspect of things. So you see, a man is not complete if he lives in a world of statistical truths, he must live in a world of his biological truth, that is his biological truth that is not merely statistics. Yet our natural science makes everything into an average, reduces everything into an average, and of course, all the individual qualities are wiped out. That of course is most unbecoming, it is unhygienic, it deprives people of their specific values where they are individuals. It deprives them of the most important experiences of their life where they experience their own value, the creative background of their personality and we think we are able to be born today with no history. That is a disease. That’s absolutely abnormal. Because man is not born everyday. He is once born in a specific historical setting, with its specific historical qualities and therefore he is only complete when he has a relation to these things. It is as if you were born without eyes and ears when you are growing up without connection to the past. From the standpoint of natural science, you need no connection to the past, you can wipe it out. And that is a mutilation of the human being.” [1: 45:43-49:25] Continue reading “Carl G. Jung on reductionism, and its implication on homo oeconomicus in the era of big data analytics”→

The world is getting faster and smaller. We are at an age where social media platforms over the internet are no longer activities that we engage in only during our spare time, but rather have them as integrated activities into the workings of our lives. Internet and wireless technology today allows us to traverse geographic boundaries, space and time in order to create new relations, work across cities in virtual groups with people from different time zones, where getting in touch with others from different cultural backgrounds is the norm. It is in view of this scenario of the greater interconnectedness in the world that this paper is writ, where together with other scholars [1-5], supports the call for more comprehensive perspectives in the study of national cultures.

The call towards a more dynamic and integrated perspective towards the study of culture, can be viewed as a development of theory in the field that is built upon the previous works of other outstanding scholars in the field of cultural studies that began in the 1930s with studies in cultural anthropology in relation to organisation [6-10]. Theoretical development in cultural studies at both national and organizational levels took ground during the 1970s with the expansive work of Geert Hofstede. Covering more than 70 countries with IBM employee values scores collected between 1967 and 1973, his efforts culminated in a book in 1980, Cultures Consequnces that outlined Continue reading “Fang’s Yin Yang perspective on culture as complementary to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions paradigm”→